哈弗商务28.pdfVIP

Lecture Text Jan W. Rivkin Where Do Great Strategies Come From? (edited for clarity) Introduction I want to use the Ryanair case as a key input to a broader discussion of a question that I think is of fundamental interest. The question is, where do great strategies come from? And I think a natural candidate answer is, great strategies come from great strategic planning processes. And what Im going to argue is first, that there are pathologies in the traditional planning process that actually make it fairly unlikely that the process is going to produce great strategies. And Im going to advocate an alternative approach that I think captures fairly cleanly the gist of what many great strategists actually do when they go about their business and try to lay out explicitly what that process looks like. Now before I can do any of that, I have to be very explicit about what I think constitutes a great strategy. So thats the plan. So I’m going to say what I think the tests of an effective competitive strategy are, and then use that to offer a critique, I hope a respectful critique, of the traditional strategic planning process. And then I’ll offer an alternative approach, with a special emphasis on where creative options come from, on how you can be more creative and come up with new strategies. What is Strategy? I need to be clear about what constitutes a great strategy. Before I can even go into that, I have to come clean and say what I mean by a strategy, because there are a gazillion definitions out there. The definition Ive put up here is one that my colleagues and I have found to be fairly effective. Its straightforward. It says, A strategy is an integrated set of choices that position a firm, in an industry, to earn superior returns over the long run. And this, to me, is useful because it re